SO’09: Transitions in the blogging lifestyle

January 23, 2009 in Science | No comments

I was surprised by the ScienceOnline’09 session Transitions: Changing your online persona as your real life changes, moderated by Propter Doc and ScienceWoman. Privacy and professional respectability is one of the hot issues for some science bloggers / researchers due to the stigma their superiors and potential employers might stubbornly hold; they might not view them as doing credible work. Let’s admit it first, there’s a lot of nonsensical blogs out there, but the serious ones get no respect out of sheer and convenient generalization. Some people in the session sounded like they feared their advisor would find out that they write blog. One blogger came up to me after the session to ask if I would withhold posting pictures of this person online.

I’m sorry, but there was a moment during the session that I found amusing and I had to wrestle down a laugh. It’s a serious issue that I had never thought about, and I could not help but view some of the bloggers as dealing with coming out issues. It threw me off guard when my brain decided to draw this parallel between them and closeted gays and lesbians. Instead of standing atop of a dinner table to announce, “I’M GAY,” I envisioned a grad student standing on the table during a lab meeting to shout, “I BLOG!”

Honestly, I sometimes find it a little uncomfortable to mention that I blog, but I did not want to seem that I am cocky enough to believe that I would have an audience; it’s just a fun exercise even if only one or two friends read it. I never had to think that about science blogging while working in science—those two parts of my life never co-occurred. When I rise to the position of authority, not only do I have to ease people by telling them I’m accommodating to women’s, race, LGBTI and religious issues, but I also have to tell them that I write a blog and it’s okay if they also maintain a blog because they’re still the same person. What kind of world are we living in? Internet growing pains are a little too much for me sometimes.

One person in the discussion was quite adamant that people should always be open to their bosses.

ScienceWoman, Janet D. Stemwedel, Coturnix, James Annan have their own thoughts on this and related issues.

SO’09: Sigma Xi Center’s Hall of Honor

January 22, 2009 in History, Photo Essay, Photography, Science | No comments

Sigma Xi Hall of Honor, in front of windows

Hall of Honor: Albert Einstein

Hall of Honor: Watson & Crick

The year I was born.

ScienceOnline’09 was hosted at the Sigma Xi Center in the Triangle, which housed the Hall of Honor in one of its wings. The hall is comprised of three stacks of polish panels facing large windows, honoring Sigma Xi members who have won the Nobel Prize. Albert Einstein is on there, as well as Luis Alvarez, Barbara McClintock and Al Gore.

Luis Alvarez!

Hall of Honor.

Al Gore

The shiny slabs are an irresistible piece of decor—people at the unconference kept staring at it, looking for familiar names, asking questions and taking photos it. It is rather intimating, too, not from standing below the giant slabs of impressive names, but I felt that I should have recognized more of the Nobel laureates. Regardless, it was a great historical segue at the unconference.

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SO’09: Digital darkroom is now busy

January 21, 2009 in Photography | No comments

ScienceOnline'09

Here is the ScienceOnline’09 Flickr pool and the scio09 Flicker tag.

The curse of the photographer is the hours I have to spend sitting in front of a computer to sort and adjust all my photos. I’m a little picky, so I am sorry that I won’t have all my photos ready for a few days. I will add them to the Flickr pool for everyone’s convienence.

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Brown recluse: More reclusive than you believe

January 21, 2009 in Science, Urban Legends | 3 comments

Is the brown recluse even in your state? Probably not.

Is the brown recluse in your state? Probably not. (Map Credit: Burke Museum, University of Washington)

Chesire is helping to demystify one of America’s favorite scapegoats (or scapespiders?): Loxoceles reclusa 101 (brown recluse)

Here in California, we don’t even have any brown recluses, but occasionally the news sensationalizes them. Since they’re not found in much of the United States, most doctors naturally have never seen one.

I have heard that in parts of the United States, hobo spiders (Tegenaria agrestis) are commonly misdiagnosed as brown recluse bites. Have anyone heard about this? Citations?

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SO’09: Designing Sundays

January 21, 2009 in Photography, Science, Writing | 1 comment

How blogging material is born.

These were my Sunday sessions:

  1. Blogging 102: How to make your blog better
  2. How to search scientific literature

In discussing design and color theory in “Blogging 102,” I suggested that everyone check out Adobe’s free Kuler service. You can select from many pre-designed color schemes, or create your own. Simply select one color and, depending on your options, Kuler will create a number of other colors to complement it.

These were the demos I watched:

  1. Nature Network
  2. Lablogatórios
  3. Scienceblogs.com
  4. ResearchBlogging.org

Due to some AV trouble, April’s SciVee.tv demo got nudged back so that I had to leave before I could watch her’s.

The “How to search scientific literature” discussion had even more AV trouble. The moderators couldn’t get the projector working, and at one point they accidentally activated the motorized blinds to cover up the windows. If there’s AV trouble and the blinds get switched, then the controls are just really badly designed; no excuses. If I ever designed a conference room, the most important thing I would stress is user interface, user interface, user interface! Nothing else about the conference room will work because I don’t know how to design conference rooms, but at least the AV user interface will be intuitive, easy to use and beautiful.

I had a brief discussion with someone on Friday evening on how science and technical writing is like designing user interfaces. In both cases, you have to known your audience, how they think, react, respond and understand. In my technical writing classes I spend a lot of time writing down the list of words that my intended audience will and will not understand. I’ve even sent out surveys to my friends to test if my ideas are sound. It’s not as easy I as I’m making it out to be, but it’s fun to do.

Lets not forget that Sunday lunch an amazing platter of Mediterranean food. I want the food again for 2010.

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World Air Traffic

January 20, 2009 in Off-Topic | No comments

At some point over the weekend I mentioned this to someone at ScienceOnline’09, but this video of world air traffic is fascinating to anyone:

Looks like ants, doesn’t it?

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SO’09: The structure of a Saturday

January 19, 2009 in Photography, Science, Writing | 1 comment

Bora & Anton opening the unconference.

On Saturday, I attended these ScienceOnline’09 sessions:

  1. You are a science blogger but you want to publish a pop-sci book?
  2. Transitions: Changing your online persona as your real life changes
  3. Rhetoric of science: Print vs. web
  4. Alternative careers: How to become a journal editor
  5. Blog carnivals: Why you should participate
  6. How to become a (paid) science journalist: Advice for bloggers

Do you smell a pattern, especially with #1, #3, #4 and #6?

In “How to become a science journalist,” Tom Levenson and Rebecca Skloot mentioned how blogging does not necessarily improve writing skills (thank goodness for community college writing courses). They particularly stressed one topic for writers: structure, structure, structure. Essentially, it’s how the writing is broken down and organized, since strictly chronological is necessarily the most interesting, and the inverted pyramid is dependable but can be a little bland.

Writing structure is hard, but it is important; that was the take home message if I really wanted to condense it down to so few words. The structure controls the flow of information as not to overwhelm the audience. It paces it, keeps the information interesting and lets storytelling narratives to be woven in.

Levenson and Skloot also vindicated one of my favorite strategies for learning structure: watch movies and study their plot structure.

When I think about structure, I sometimes think about the This American Life episode “81 Words.” In it, reporter Alix Spiegel uses a simple but brilliant structure to bookend her story on how the American Psychiatric Association stopped defining homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973. She starts off talking about how her closeted grandfather was the APA president-elect, then launches into a complex but largely chronological story involving dozens of people (her grandfather is scarcely mentioned) before concluding it by going back to the story about her grandfather.

This bookending structure is common, but how Spiegel uses it in her story is rather brilliant. It starts with the story on one person before jumping off of it as a springboard into the true meat of the story. It anchors the story early on with a recognizable figure (a family member) that listeners can quickly grasp, but then it completely avoids sensationalizing that person as a lone hero. Overemphasizing a single person—and overlooking team players—is a problem I sometimes see in science writing, or any nonfiction writing with complex narratives, so I was immensely overjoyed the first time I heard “81 Words.”

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SO’09: Thank you, please come again

January 19, 2009 in Science, Writing | 4 comments

Science Online '09

ScienceOnline’09 is now over and I’m back in the warm Central Valley. I’d hoped to post a blog entry or two a day during the unconference, but the free time never materialized. My focus got commandeered by the discussions, demos and good ol’ fashion conversations with people. Many people. I have a jacket pocket stuffed with names, blogs and email addresses to sort through, so it may take a few days before I get a hold of some of you.

I met Talia Page over at TalkingScience.org, and she posted an overview of the unconference. I finally met Bora, one of the organizers, and he’s gathered a number of overviews.

If the sheer inspiration and motivation wasn’t enough, I got a lot of ideas that I want to develop for this blog. I’ll elaborate on this more in future posts.

I thank Kevin again for first letting me know about the conference. It was more than worth my while. I look forward to Science Online ‘10. See you next year!

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SO’09: Henrietta Lacks & Rebecca Skloot

January 16, 2009 in Photography, Science, Writing | 8 comments

Rebecca Skloot

This evening I heard Rebecca Skloot (above) read from her upcoming book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks about the HeLa cell culture line and the woman that they were derived from. Skloot is a science journalist who as contributed to the New York Times Magazine and RadioLab, among many others.

Henrietta Lacks. Unknown copyright.

Human cells have a natural limit on how often they can divide before they die (Hayflick limit). Cancer cells have mutations that overcome this limit, granting them “immortality” since each cell can potentially go through an unlimited number of reproductions that most healthy cells cannot approach. This happened to the cervical cancer cells in Henrietta Lacks in 1951. A biopsy was taken from her and, without her knowledge or consent, her cancer cells became the first line of immortal human cells ever grown in lab culture. Tragically, Henrietta Lacks herself died from her cancer months after she was diagnosed.

Her unwitting contribution to science lead to a vast number of advances and discoveries. Her cells were used to develop the first polio vaccine. Her cells allowed scientist to find the link between cancer and the human papillomavirus (HPV). Dozens in the audience raised their hands when Skloot asked if they used HeLa cells in their research.

I have heard of HeLa cells before, but I have heard little about Henrietta Lacks, so I was absorbed by the reading.

I asked a question during the Q&A after the talk, and Skloot’s answer really drove home a core point in science writing. I asked her how she was able to warm up to the Lacks family after they refused her interviews for a year and a half. She tried several ways, but one of them was that she explained to the Lacks family the science behind Henrietta’s cells; no one had slowed down to understand their confusion and helped them apprehend what it really meant.

I hope to buy a copy of Skloot’s book when it is published in about a year.

Photography

I don’t take very many portraits, but for some reason I decided that I wanted to take one of Rebecca Skloot. After her talk, I approached her and complimented on how much I enjoyed her reading and talk, and then asked if I could take a her portrait. She courteously obliged, and I gave her one quick instruction (take a step back) before I snapped away. I wish I remembered to bring my flash with me to fill in some shadow detail, but I still liked how the portrait turned out.

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SO’09: Great Basin Desert

January 15, 2009 in Science | No comments

McCarran International Airport, Southwest Airlines and the Luxor.

Here I am, heading to North Carolina to spend a few days at the ScienceOnline’09 conference. I’m on a layover at McCarran Airport in tacky Las Vegas before heading off to Raleigh-Durham.

I got on my flight without enough sleep, so I spent most of it resting with eyes closed. At some pointed I opened my eyes to peak at the Great Basin desert out the window, 30,000 ft below. During my last year as a UC Davis student, I learned about the Great Basin from a geology class for non-majors. I loved the geology class, but it is amazing to see it the Great Basin from above with my own eyes.

The desert is made up of north-south running rows of parallel mountain ranges with wide valleys running between them. It is really hard to tell from the ground that the mountains and valleys are forming this pattern. This arrangement is known as a basin and range, formed by the fact that Nevada has been expanding in the east-west direction for millions of years. Like spreading pizza dough, the crust in the Great Basin is extremely thin, and the cracks and gaps created by the spread is what creates the regular pattern of mountains.

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